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Michele Mandel, Toronto Sun

Jun 1, 2011

, Last Updated: 4:54 AM ET

He’s a convicted criminal, alleged bigamist, perjurer and child abductor and if that weren’t enough, he’s also the prime suspect in the mysterious disappearance of his first wife in Israel.
So how is it that Moshe Abuaf aka Moshe Aviv remains in Toronto and has actually been allowed to claim refugee status?
To the brother of missing Nadine Kar Abuaf, our granting a safe haven to the man he believes killed his sister is outrageous.
To the unsuspecting Toronto woman conned into marrying Abuaf without knowing his criminal past, his being here is an insult to legitimate refugees.
And though both have repeatedly flooded government officials with evidence of the 35-year-old’s alleged misdeeds, no one will do a thing.
Five years on, his Canadian perjury charge was withdrawn and his refugee hearing is still pending with his preposterous claim that he fears “torture” in Israel because he’s been wrongly accused of murdering his wife.
“It’s bizarre that anyone could consider that he had a legitimate basis,” marvels an angry Joseph Kar.
“Canada is housing a criminal who left Israel to flee the repercussions of the (alleged) murder.”
Almost 10 years have passed since Kar’s sister was last seen dropping her two-year-old son off at his daycare in Israel.
This Wednesday would have marked her 41st birthday.
“I would love to bury my sister but unfortunately I don’t have that. I just don’t and it’s still very, very difficult to deal with,” her brother says.
Kar is a prominent attorney in Los Angeles where both he and his sister were raised.
Nadine, he says, was a beautiful, accomplished young woman who had a bevy of well-heeled suitors vying to woo her.
Instead, she moved to Israel in 1995 and fell in love with a shady man from the wrong side of the tracks.
Abuaf’s long list of Israeli criminal charges date back to 1992 with everything from uttering death threats and extortion to arson and assault, but mysteriously most of the cases were closed due to lack of evidence or what the police there call “no public interest”.
Their father refused to attend their lavish 1998 wedding so a reluctant Kar gave his sister away in his place.
“We tried to reason with my sister and it didn’t work,” Kar says.
“I even told her face to face if you want to leave right now, I’m ready,” he recalls, his voice suddenly soft across the long distance line.
“She said, ‘No, I’m pregnant.’ It was the biggest mistake I’d ever seen in my life and I had to play along.”
The marriage was a disaster, with his sister filing charges against her new husband for assault.
In 2000, she summoned the courage to leave him and her brother says the battle over their divorce and custody of their son grew increasingly ugly.
Kar was on the phone with his terrified sister when he says he overheard Abuaf threaten her. “He said, ‘Wait and see. I’m going to take care of you. You’re going to disappear.’”
Three months later, on Dec. 21, 2001, Nadine vanished.
Abuaf made a public appeal for his estranged wife, offered a reward, even led searches for her, but quietly told friends and relatives that she must have run away.
Her worried family didn’t believe it for a moment — and neither, it seems, did the suspicious Israeli police.
Investigators got their break eight months later when Abuaf’s new girlfriend fled to authorities claiming he’d threatened her as well.
“She said he told her, ‘Wait and see, I’ll take care of you like I took care of Nadine,’” Kar says.
Abuaf was arrested and held for 75 days on suspicion of murder.
“We have new evidence that ties Abuaf to the disappearance and even the murder of Nadine,” investigator Menashe Arviv told Israeli reporters in September 2002.
But with no body and no murder weapon, he was eventually released.
He was convicted, though, of assaulting his ex-girlfriend.
Nadine’s distraught mother moved to Israel to search for her daughter and gain access to her grandson.
In 2004, she won a restraining order preventing Abuaf from taking the boy out of the country.
But in the summer of 2006, he convinced a family court judge to allow him to take his son on a trip to EuroDisney on condition Abuaf’s relatives put up a $25,000 bond that would be forfeited if he didn’t return home by the start of school.
Abuaf, though, had other plans.
He flouted the Israeli court order and disappeared.
Nadine’s family had no idea where he and the child had gone.
And then several years later, they were horrified to learn the former murder suspect had changed his name to Moshe Aviv, settled in Toronto and set his sights on another beautiful woman who would fall for his dangerous charms.